Now there’s an attention-grabbing headline, one I never expected to use here. My ongoing series of posts is supposed to focus on books, writing and my own life story.
But, in fact, the topic actually fits easily into all three categories.
Earlier this fall, I was visiting San Francisco, staying in the downtown core, primarily the Financial District, and venturing out often to Union Square, to make use of the Apple store’s training opportunities.
On two occasions, we ventured into the closest drugstore, a Walgreens, in search of some small articles. While my partner shopped, I glanced around, engaging the security guard in conversation or checking out the shelves to see how prices compared to those back home. No big deal.
Or so I thought.
On the last day of our week’s stay, I chanced upon a copy of the September 27 edition of the Wall Street Journal, and found this article by Zusha Elinson:
The rest of the story explores the details of the preceding build-up, the crime itself, the two principal participants, the ensuing fracas and the results. The event happened over a year earlier, in the spring of 2023.
The story of shoplifting and urban crime will be familiar to anyone living in North America today. Such (often daily) stories interact with issues related to the pandemic, local and state politics, policing, mental health, poverty and drug abuse.
As such, at first, I was only struck by the proximity of the event to our trajectory through the city and how, if it had occurred on another day in our lives, things might have turned out differently for us. Then, reading through the article, I realized there was much more to the incident.
In particular, I was impacted by Mr. Elinson’s detailed examination of the various aspects of the case, how the pandemic and the rise of shoplifting led to heightened security measures and the public’s demands to deal the crime wave.
But, what most hit me was Mr. Elinson’s empathy for the two individuals most affected by the crime: the security guard and the shoplifter. In the article he goes into detail on the backgrounds of both.
In my view, the article is an example of exceptional journalism, a rare event in these days where many newspapers have folded, staff reduced and chains thinned out as budgets are constricted.
Most newspaper stories today rarely get beyond the sensational headline, or the meat and potatoes of the incident. Deadlines and cost pressures mean reporters can’t go into such depth, rarely getting into root cause and onger-term effects. And in these polarized times, journalists often take a position, in favor of either the citizenry and society or the vulnerable and underprivileged.
But such tragedies do affect everyone and Mr. Elinson, to his credit, does this most successfully. Who was the victim here? Both the security guard and the shoplifter it seems.
Fortunately, much has changed since this event.
Although I don’t have online access to the WSJ article to share it, here’s a link. For those who wish more free detail on what occurred, Mr. Elinson goes into the lead up, events and denouement in an excellent podcast (33 minutes) produced by the California Sun on October 3, 2024.
Now back home and having researched Mr. Elinson, I see he is also the co-author of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15. It’s available on Amazon ($35.55 hard cover; $14.99 in Kindle):
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023
Here’s what the New York Times (Mike Spies) had to say about the chilling story: “A magisterial work of narrative history and original reportage . . . You can feel the tension building one cold, catastrophic fact at a time . . . A virtually unprecedented achievement.”
Finally, here are the two authors being interviewed on ABC News (5 min, 41 seconds):
There’s a lot of excellent journalism out there, both short story and long story. It’s worth supporting, wherever you find it.
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